Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and
talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for
other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals
of the American Republic, in order that some day on American
soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics
both so sadly lack. We the darker ones come even now not
altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents
of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence
than the American Negroes; there is no true American music
but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American
fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all,
we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence
in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be
poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with
light-hearted but determined Negro humility? or her coarse
and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar
music with the soul of the Sorrow Songs?

Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the
great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving
of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is
almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it
in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of
their fathers' fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.


And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let
me on coming pages tell again in many ways, with loving
emphasis and deeper detail, that men may listen to the striving
in the souls of black folk.